WHAT OTHERS SAY: Future of cars: nobody at the wheel

Scripps Howard News Service

Published
12:00 am EDT, Monday, October 1, 2012

Enjoy driving your car now. You may not be doing it much longer. The driverless car is here.

Gov. Jerry Brown has given the go-ahead for self-driving cars on a test basis in California, our largest and most auto-addicted state and incubator of national trends. The caveat is that a human with a license to drive must be in the driver's seat.

The technology for driverless cars is already here -- radar sensors, laser range finders, video, GPS and the computer capacity to pull it altogether. Commutes will be faster and safer because the car can communicate with other cars and traffic monitors, decreasing congestion.

And, the driverless car is the answer to a problem that has bedeviled auto safety specialists -- the fast-rising number of accidents, with accompanying deaths and injuries, caused by distracted driving.

The Wall Street Journal devoted a special report to driverless cars in which writer Dan Neil concluded, "Twenty-five years from now, piloting one's own vehicle will seem weirdly anachronistic and unnecessary, like riding a mule to the mall." At the speed which driverless technology is developing, that may be on the conservative side.

It has long been said among automotive engineers that the most unreliable and dangerous part in a car is the nut behind the wheel. After more than a century of automotive development, we may finally have solved that problem.

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